To Tell The Truth

As part of the Versatile Slattern Blogger award, I was supposed to tell you 7 random facts about myself. OK, I am just now getting around to it.

1.  I am old enough to have watched the original To Tell the Truth on TV. (I hear in my head "a Goodson-Todman production!")  With Bud Collyer as host and, often, Kitty Carlisle as panelist.

2.  I always think Kitty Carlisle was once Miss America. Am I confusing her with a panelist on another game show? Kitty Carlisle was married to Moss Hart.

3. I played Alice in You Can't Take It With You, by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, in the Steppenwolf production of this play in Chicago.

4. Alice is the "normal" member of a wacky family.  I am the wacky member of my Normal family.

5.  Dove soap is 1/4 moisturizing cream! (I think they used to say "one quarter cleansing cream" on television commercials during To Tell the Truth.  My mother told me that once Kitty Carlisle, doing the live lead-in to the commercial, pronounced it "dove" with a long "o," so it was about the past tense of "dive" instead of the bar soap with the bird of peace as part of its logo, but the past tense of "dive" as "dove" is also a bit apocryphal and was earlier, and more correctly, "dived," though "dove" is now in common use and perfectly acceptable. That's what happens to language. It wears down, like a bar of soap.)

6.  "Will the real Justin Evans please stand up?"  To Tell the Truth is a game show in which three people answer questions about the identity of one real person, who is there, the other two being imposters. The celebrity panelists, usually including Kitty Carlisle, try to figure out which one is the real bar of soap. At the end, Bud Collyer asks, "Will the real so-and-so please stand up?"  (But he never called anyone a so-and-so.)

After reading all about the poet Justin Evans in some recent poet blog entries, I stumbled on Justin Evans in the blog of Margaret Evans Porter (via Julie Kistler's theatre blog); she was claiming him as her cousin and the author of White Devil. When I checked Amazon, I found yet another Justin Evans (Justin Wayne Evans), who has written a book of poems called Moonlit Memories.

They can all stand up, and Kitty Carlisle can, too!

(Not really. She died in 2007.)

7.  I love random coincidii. But you already knew that. For example, Kitty Carlisle was in the opera The Rape of Lucretia, by Benjamin Britten, mentioned in yesterday's blog entry.

Who gnu? Not me, until I went on one of those infinity loops in the Internet. Now all that's left of me is a little sliver in danger of getting stuck in the drain.